Kafka's Zoopoetics is the first extensive account of animals and human-animal relations in the work of Franz Kafka. The book appeals to a broad audience, including scholars and students of Comparative Literature, German Studies, Cultural Studies, and Human-Animal Studies. Kafka’s pivotal role in world literature cannot be overestimated. Exploring the multidimensional relations between humans …
Originally published in 1945, An Historical and Analytical Bibliography of the Literature of Cryptology provides a comprehensive listing of the most important works written up to that time on cryptography, as well as works in related fields in which cryptography appears. It includes a vast range of materials: scientific and technical works dealing with military, diplomatic, and commercial uses …
Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740-1790 offers the first study of manuscript-producing coteries as an integral element of eighteenth-century Britain’s literary culture. As a corrective to literary histories assuming that the dominance of print meant the demise of a vital scribal culture, the book profiles four interrelated and influential coteries, focusing on each…
As an American author who chose to live in Europe, Henry James frequently wrote about cultural differences between the Old and New World. The plight of bewildered Americans adrift on a sea of European sophistication became a regular theme in his fiction.
This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood co…
The author’s contention is that Chekhov’s plays have often been misinterpreted by scholars and directors, particularly through their failure to adequately balance the comic and tragic elements inherent in these works. Through a close examination of the form and content of Chekhov’s dramas, the author shows how deeply pessimistic or overly optimistic interpretations fail to sufficiently ac…
What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives explores this unprecedented question on the rich ground of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s fiction. Each author discovered techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion Kitzinger calls mimetic life: the reader’s sense of a character’s embodied existence. Both authors tested the limits of that illusion by pushing it toward the novelâ…
This is the first English-language study of the Chinese writer’s work and influence, featuring essays from scholars in a range of disciplines, from both China and the United States. Its introduction, twelve articles, and epilogue aim to deepen and widen critical discussions of both a specific literary author and the globalization of Chinese literature more generally.The book takes the â…
Carnival Texts comprises three related dramatic works, all of which have as their point of departure Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, a literary style designed to subvert dominant assumptions through chaos and humour. Making creative use of post-Brechtian performance theory, these texts blur the distinction between spectator and performer in a fascinating exploration of…
Technocrats of the Imagination traces the rise of collaborative art and technology labs in the U.S. from WWII to the present. Ryan Bishop and John Beck reveal the intertwined histories of the avant-garde art movement and the military-industrial complex, showing how radical pedagogical practices traveled from Germany’s Bauhaus movement to the U.S. art world and interacted with government-funde…